"If it's a penny for your thoughts, and you put your two cents in, someone's making a penny." -- Steven Wright

Friday, July 4, 2008

Knowing History Really Is Good

James T. Harris is spewing more idiocy. I know this because I read a post at dad29's site titled "Knowing History is Good." Daddio swallows Harris' tripe whole and provides a link. There Harris wrote:

Hey, did you know that Dr. King was a Republican? Honestly, I knew that his father was a Republican, heck every black person born before 1960 was a Republican, so why do we never see "Republican" and "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." in the same sentence?

He concludes that [we] blacks were hoodwinked.

As dad29 is wont to gargle: "Unnnhhhhhgurglespitunnhh."

Did you know that Jesse Helms died today at the age of 86. If you're not familiar with the career of this race-baiting embarrassment to US politics, check out Wiki where you can find this tidbit of info:

Helms began his career in politics as an unofficial researcher for Willis Smith, a conservative Democratic lawyer and former president of the American Bar Association, who successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 1950. Smith ran as a supporter of racial segregation. After the election, Senator Smith hired Helms to be his administrative assistant in Washington, D.C. In 1952, Helms worked on the presidential campaign of Senator Richard B. Russell, Jr., of Georgia, who was seeking the Democratic nomination. When Smith suddenly died in 1953, Helms left Washington and returned to Raleigh.

Helms was a Democrat. As I pointed out to daddio, MLK's parents may well have been Republican. I don't know. The reason was most likely because the Democratic Party had within its ranks Southern Democrats who were associated with racial segregation and were some of the worst race baiters. These were refugees from the Civil War, in which the victorious North was associated with the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln (both partys being very different today).

With the passage of the Civil Rights Amendment, these Southern Democrats, in droves, moved to which party(?) ... why, the Republican Party, because in it was represented those ideals that Southern Democrats now found lacking in the more-inclusive Democratic party.

King may have been Republican. But I can state fairly certainly that would not have remained so if he had been inclined to state a preference.